The Sentinel

by C Cato

  “How dare you!” Ice dripped from every word. “You’ve kidnapped me, drugged me—and what? —brought me to the middle of some gang war somewhere? Who the hell are you people?”

  Risa, Soren, and Ditre had positioned themselves around her with enough room to stay out of reach.

  “You’re not going to like this,” said Cole gruffly.

  “Fucking try me!”

  “Ian thought that what happened to you was an attempt on your life. Corporate espionage. He couldn’t prove it. He brought me and my team in as protection. We went way back, the two of us. For the first couple of years after your accident, he was a wreck. Barely ate or slept while he fought to keep you alive and find a solution for the replication problem. He finally did. The Halo.” Cole tapped his head with his index finger. “Yours was external at first. It was a computer that interfaced with the nanobots to regulate cell production. Eventually, he created a type of net interface placed directly on the brain. That is what we all have now. He’d also refined the nanobots. Instead of just destroying and replacing cancerous cells with synthetic healthy ones, they replaced any dying or unhealthy cell they found.” Cole raked his fingers through his hair. “He created the fountain of youth. It only made him more paranoid that someone was coming to get him. I guess he was right.”

  She narrowed her eyes, but at least she was listening. “Almost a year before we went to sleep with you, a rival company began a bid for a hostile takeover. Ian was positive the two were related. He wanted to hide you away. Make sure you were protected. He asked my team to undergo the transformation with you. Seven of us met the genetic marker criteria. The four of us survived the procedure.”

  She turned in a slow circle to gaze at everyone her mouth slowly dropping open, then stopped again at Cole, shaking her head slowly, a deep crease etched in her brow.

  “They knew the risks. We all did. Ian needed our help and we gave it.” He paused to give that time to sink in and to let her ask any questions she might have. When she stood silently, he continued. “He placed us in the bunker when he was sure the takeover would happen and destroyed everything, but he told me backups existed somewhere just didn’t tell me where.”

  “The bunker being attacked is what triggered the beds to wake us up,” said Ditre, continuing the narrative. “But we didn’t expect—”

  Sonya waited, tapping her toe. Delicate eyebrows raised.

  “We didn’t expect to be asleep for two centuries,” Cole finished.

  She wobbled, her legs shaking hard, and Cole stepped in to hold her steady with a firm grip on her shoulders.

  “It can’t be true,” she rasped.

  “It’s true. We’re standing in what should be the middle of Olympia Washington.”

  She stepped back, batting his hands away. “You’re lying!” Turning on her heels, she shoved her way through Ditre and Soren and stomped off into the woods.

  “Risa?”

  Without a word, she ran to catch the distraught doctor.

  Soren whistled. “That went better than I expected.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sonya

  “Sonya! Please hold up,” called Risa, running to catch up.

  Sonya clenched her teeth but slowed her feet. She didn’t want to talk to any of them. Didn’t want to be here.

  Two hundred years.

  Somehow the city she’d lived in was gone. If what they said was true, everyone she knew was gone, too. Momma. Her brother and sisters. Ian.

  The thought hit her like a cement brick. Suddenly, her legs could no longer support her weight, and she crashed hard to her knees.

  Her stomach wanted to empty, but there was nothing in it. Instead, she bent forward and dry heaved.

  “Sonya!” Risa knelt beside her and rubbed her back.

  Sonya wanted to push her away, but the gesture comforted her.

  When she finished, she sat up and Risa moved, giving her space. Wiping her mouth, she noticed the blood on her sleeve and touched the place where the arrow had cut through her skin. It barely tingled. So that much was true at least. She hosted the genesis nanobots in her body, and probably the Halo device that Cole told her about. Her body was still functioning after two hundred years, but that brought up things she wasn’t ready to face yet.

  “Why are you here?”

  “We were just attacked. You shouldn’t be alone.”

  “Not what I mean. Why are you here, in the future with me? You risked your lives for a person you’ve never met at the request of your employer? That doesn’t make sense.”

  Risa sat back on her heels and chewed on the corner of her lip. “I think Cole should talk to you about that, but just know it’s something we did willingly. I think the whole team would have done it if they’d been able.”

  “What did Ian promise you? Stock options? They’re probably worth a lot by now. You can all retire happily.” Sonya hated how bitter she sounded, but she had no reason to trust these people. So far nothing they’d told her made any sense at all.

  Sonya regarded the small soldier as she stood, hands on her hips, face stormy.

  Taking a step forward, Risa poked Sonya between the breasts, knocking the wind from her lungs with a grunt of air. “I get that this is hard for you, but there is no reason to be a bitch. We’re in this together.” She spun on her heels and resumed her forward trek. “And for your information, we didn’t get anything for agreeing to protect you.”

  Sonya took a deep breath in through her nose and out through her mouth to calm her anger, before getting up and walking after her. “Why? Even if you didn’t know you would wake up two hundred years later, the procedure had to have been dangerous. Then there’s the whole genetic compatibility issue.”

  Risa blanched. “The marker. Yeah, we knew the risks.”

  “That still doesn’t answer my question. Why do this? You risked your lives and left behind everything you knew to what? Protect a stranger? Don’t give me that shit about Cole having to tell me. He can hear us, can’t he?”

  She grimaced. “Cole was invested. When he volunteered the rest of us did the same. You see,” she said, stopping again. “We’re his family. We miss our brothers and sisters, but we count ourselves lucky to still be alive.”

  “Alive and stuck with me. What could Ian have been thinking?”

  Sonya tensed when Risa brushed her arm. “He did incredible things, invented incredible things to save your life. In the end, he wanted to ensure you would continue to be protected.”

  “Great.” Colleagues had always accused Sonya of being distant and cold. Only Ian pushed through the curtain of distance to see the vulnerable woman beyond. The one that had to rebuild her reputation after one cruel betrayal. Pushing away personal interactions became second nature as she clawed her way up the ladder of scientists and PhDs.

  They’d reached a break in the trees, and the ground sloped gradually down. The sun poked through a thickening gray cloud layer that was stealing the remaining daylight.

  A city. Or the skeleton of one.

  There didn’t seem to be a single building left intact and most were rubble or crumbling foundations. Trees dotted the landscape beyond. The forest seemed to stretch fingers of green outward to cover everything in its path. Vague shapes of cars hidden behind creeper vines and years of growth dotted the landscape. Animals freely roamed the remnants. Sonya thought she saw a wolf or dog slip under one of the car-shaped bushes.

  “Cole, you need to get here now,” said Risa, a tremor in her voice.

  “Fuck,” breathed Soren from behind them.

  “Everywhere? Do you think it’s like this everywhere?” asked Ditre, quietly.

  “No,” said Cole, his deep voice welcome in the stillness of the dead city.

  How could she hate someone so much and also want them so badly? She found herself leaning toward him like a sunflower toward the sun.

  “The people that came after us had weapons, uniforms. They had to come from somewhere.”

  “I d
on’t think it was a war,” said Soren, striding further down the hill.

  “What makes you say that,” asked Sonya, needing something to latch onto. To keep her mind busy before she went insane. It was too much. It was all too much.

  “I can’t say for sure, but I don’t see the kind of destructive damage associated with wars. Need to take a closer look.”

  Together, they moved in a tight huddle down the rest of the hill to what must have been a street at one point. For the first time since waking up, Sonya was glad of their company.

  The asphalt had decayed to basic rocks, but there was a uniform path of them leading into the ruins.

  “Does anyone know what this town used to be?” asked Sonya.

  “If we’ve been continuing southeast, a small place on the back end of Tumwater,” said Cole.

  “Maybe people just moved away,” said Sonya. “If there wasn’t enough money to be made in the town it could have been abandoned.” She wanted so much for that to be true.

  Cole grunted. At least he acknowledged that she’d said something, but it still made angry heat rise in her face. “Right now, we need to focus on finding a safe place. We’ll figure out how to get back to the bunker so we can recharge.”

  “Recharge?”

  “The nanobots and Halo need to be recharged. Induction. Our beds can do it.”

  “What happens when it gets too low?”

  Cole exchanged glances with the others.

  “Stop that! Just tell me! I’m a doctor, for fuck’s sake! Treat me like the fucking adult that I am!”

  “She’s got a mouth on her,” muttered Risa.

  Sonya suppressed the smallest hint of a smile. She was not going to like these people.

  She hadn’t convinced herself. Her resolve was cracking.

  Cole sighed. “We don’t know what will happen if we get too low. We do have an emergency power function. It will begin to shut down nonvital systems and then vital systems by order of importance to conserve power for as long as possible.”

  “And?” Sonya knew there was more he wasn’t telling her. She wanted to know if they knew the dangers of what was inside them. Had Ian told them what happened when the nanobots no longer functioned? If not, was it appropriate to tell them? There was still the possibility they were just after her tech. If she told them about one of the flaws, would that be giving them what they’re looking for?

  “If it gets too low or shuts off, there is no guarantee our brains will handle the shutdown, since brain function is largely supported by the Halo now. There is also the concern that it might become corrupted or not power back up at all. It’s delicate.”

  “We need to get back to the bunker then,” Sonya insisted. “Everything we need is there, and if Ian left stored information there, we’ll need it to better understand what has been done to us.”

  In the end, she said nothing. If they were who they said they were, there was no need to create panic and they weren’t in danger of actually losing too much power yet. If that changed, she would tell them. If they weren’t, she knew enough to keep her mouth shut.

  Cole crossed his arms, a fierce frown distorting his features. “We aren’t going back there until we know who those people are and make sure the area is safe. Ian gave us a crash course after we had recovered enough from surgery.”

  Anger bloomed in her belly. “Did he?” she said through her teeth. “Then I guess it’s just for my own information, then.”

  Cole’s eyes flicked to Risa and back to Sonya’s before she could work up a healthy froth at the silent communication. “There isn’t anything else in the bunker. We checked. I have a pile of journals he left, but there were no computers or even any written files. It was just us and our supplies down there.”

  Sonya swallowed her disappointment. How could Ian leave them and not leave word of some kind. “I can only hope there is something in the journals that will help us. When you came to the bunker was there anything that made you believe he would leave you there?”

  Cole’s eyes flashed, and then became more distant. “No. He wouldn’t have left me—us behind.”

  Sonya noted the slip, but let it go.

  “The Sentinel One program was everything to him.”

  “Sentinel One?”

  “That’s you,” said Risa, bumping her hip with her side. “It’s what Ian called you, since you were the prototype.”

  Sonya winced at the description. It made her sound like a Frankenstein’s monster. “First of all, do you have any concept of personal boundaries?” she said to Risa with exasperation.

  The woman in question chuckled. “She really doesn’t,” supplied Soren. Risa flipped him the bird. Sonya ignored their banter and regarded Cole. “Second, why would he call me that?”

  “The program became so much more than what you had both intended. I don’t even know the full extent of the changes he made. In the end, he decided to rename it the Sentinel project.”

  “But this doesn’t make sense,” said Sonya, staring at the ground, not seeing it. “Ian wouldn’t have wiped it all out. He would have preserved it some I how. It was too important.”

  Cole nodded. “I know, but the journals were all we found. Either he couldn’t get everythin’ to the bunker for some reason, or we are missin’ somethin’. We—”

  “Shh!” shushed Risa. She tilted her head in the direction of the trees. “Shit! Move! They’re coming!” No sooner had she said that, when a small army of white-clad people came bursting from the trees.

  Sonya ran with the others. Soren and Risa were in the lead, Ditre was by her side with Cole brought up the rear. No one bothered to pull their guns. Sonya guessed it was to conserve what ammo they had left, but Soren pulled his pack off his shoulders and rummaged inside, without breaking stride. Ahead of them the road stopped abruptly, save for a rectangular opening where a building had fallen across the road. The ivy-clad remnants of structures long gone rose on either side to create a U-shaped blockade. The people in white would have to make their way around or go through the single opening one by one.

  They all ducked inside. Soren threw something behind him. The others sped up, and Sonya did, too. Seconds later, an explosion rocked the ground, and she stumbled hard. A glance over her shoulder showed the doorway was gone, and she couldn’t see their pursuers past the pile of rubble.

  Cole and the others had stopped when she had, but he recovered quickly. “That’s not goin’ to hold them long. We need to move.”

  Sonya ran at a slightly slower pace through the rest of the now-ancient city.

  When they reached the trees, they ratcheted down to a fast walk.

  She was impressed with the increased stamina the nanobots provided. A fine sheen of perspiration covered her, but she only panted softly.

  Rain had begun to fall as soon as they reached the thick canopy. A mild shower developed into a heavy deluge as the sky darkened to almost night.

  Sonya gasped as her eyesight changed and refocused. Instead of shadows, she saw everything in shades of greens. “What?”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Cole, from in front of her.

  She could see him clearly, despite the lack of light.

  “How can I see you?”

  “Night vision. Our eyes are artificial. It’s why we all have the same color. They are the interfaces we use to see information from and interact with the Halo.”

  Sonya frowned and touched her face just below her eye. “My eyes are artificial?”

  “Yes,” said Cole.

  “What color?” She wanted to fall to the ground and cry. It was all wrong. Stranded, out of time, with four strangers. Was there anything left of her?

  “Blue. The same as ours.” Cole hovered close enough to touch, but he didn’t.

  “I need to process this.”

  Risa touched her arm, and Sonya inhaled sharply at her otherworldly appearance in the bright green vision. “Don’t worry, Doc. We’ll teach you everything we know.”

  “Which is
n’t much, so don’t hold your breath,” said Soren.

  “Okay, people. Enough,” said Cole, gesturing for Soren and Ditre to join their small circle. “We need to find some shelter. Something that can be defended.”

  They all gave curt salutes and ran off in different directions to search. Sonya didn’t get orders, and she was grateful for that. Cole waited with her, but he gave her space and quiet.

  Cole paced. Sonya put her back to a tree and sank to the ground. She tried to concentrate on what she was going to do, but found her gaze returning again and again to the military man. Bathed in the green glow of her augmented vision, he was still gorgeous. All hard angles and chiseled detail. The fierce expression that darkened his beautiful face made it easier to ignore the strange desire Sonya had to be close to him. Of course, there was also the issue of him tying her up and drugging her. Sonya could see his point of view. Whoever those other people were, they didn’t have good intentions, and she hadn’t made it easy for them to escape. An effort needed to be made to forgive and move on. Not easy for her.

  With some time to digest what had happened, she tried to make sense of it all. Had it really been so bad?

  Sonya rubbed the barely there ‘fro on her scalp. There wasn’t any proof of a head injury. Logically, she understood that any evidence had healed, but she wished there was something...anything that would give her evidence of what had happened. And give her a reason to trust her would-be bodyguards.

  The last thing she remembered was crossing at the crosswalk. Her mother waited in the window of the coffee shop across the street. She was smiling. There was no memory of the accident. Only the soft upturn to her mother’s face.

  She sniffed and wiped moisture from her eyes.

  Risa came jogging back.

  “Report!” barked Cole.

  “There’s some old train cars to the north.”

  Cole acknowledged her with a stiff shake of his head. “Soren, Ditre? Come back, Pixie found a place.”